Aww man, phase 2 didn’t have a great start did it. While I don’t think there’s an absolutely terrible Marvel movie, there are definitely some bad ones. Thor: The Dark World is one that a lot of people will mention as the worst. Saying it’s the worst doesn’t make it a terrible movie, it means it doesn’t hold up to the standard of the others. While Iron Man 3 would upset people straight off the bat, it would take Dark World for people to question the future quality of the MCU. Release dates had boosted up from every one+ year to two every single year.
Having more movies release in a year would make many get tired of the superhero genre very quickly. As well as that, the first two in a year together happened to be two negative films in the eyes of fans. They would eventually start to make up for this with a killer second year but at this point people were worried. Going back to this makes me realise just how mixed phase 2 was in quality. This first year was a low blow to many, with the second being two of the best movies in the MCU. But while we look at this we have to remember the time it released, no one knew year two was going to be so good yet.
I’ll give the movie credit to make it fair, Tom Hiddleston plays Loki to his very best here. Loki very quickly becomes one of the most emotionally broken characters and it makes him far more interesting than everyone else. The whole idea is that he is completely torn up about his mothers death. While he’s in prison he uses a mirage to make it appear that he is doing fine. Thor instantly knows this isn’t the case and Loki reveals to have destroyed everything in his cell. He also looks completely depressed. This is something about Loki’s character I find important. He’s always portraying himself to be this arrogant trickster who doesn’t care. Inside he has always been broken, he loves his family and nothing will ever change that.
Another point is how the setting up for the future really kicks off. This movie kicks off the idea of infinity stones and that there’s something else going on in the world. Up to this point we’ve seen two more stones on screen that we weren’t aware of. The Tesseract and the Sceptre, being the Space and Mind stone. This was good as it meant they didn’t have to suddenly create origins for every single stone as soon as possible. Meaning deep down the idea of the infinity stone could go as far back as Captain America: The First Avenger.
While these aspects of the movie are pretty interesting, the rest of it falls very flat. One of the main things that sucks is the Romance. In the first film Jane and Thor were pretty cute and had a nice little thing going on. However in this, Jane is reduced down to a damsel in distress. One of the worst possible roles to put a women in. Come on guys, what happened to Peggy Carter and Black Widow. You were finally figuring out how to show a woman on screen! Watching this you can tell that Natalie Portman is just tired of the role and wants to leave. This effects the entire chemistry of the relationship and it feels like you’re watching a performance of Rumours by Fleetwood Mac.
It becomes apparent very quickly that Tom and Chris are the only actors who seem remotely interested. Christopher Eccleston is so tired of playing the villain in this. Apparently behind the scenes he said he hated making this film and it really shows. He’s uninspiring and is defeated way to easily. There’s some decent visual stuff going on but its a newer film so you’d expect the style to be refined over time. So overall it’s not enough to make the movie visually interesting over the natural progression of movie making. It’s crazy how good we can make stuff look only a few years later so this wasn’t anything big.
Thor suffers his usual identity crisis, this time leaning slightly towards the comic side we would see in Ragnarok. However we would still have Age of Ultron to come in and make him more serious. Loki is the one carrying the emotional and distraught character to the centre stage. Which is fine for me as I love Loki and I desperately hope he’s going to live. But let’s be honest Thanos is not gonna let him go for losing him an Infinity Stone.
There’s also the usual Loki death scene which is written out as fake by the end of the movie. So at least they didn’t try to fake the emotion this time and just let us know. Either way this movie just fails to hit any good marks. Up until this point it seemed the MCU wouldn’t be able to replicate any of the same success they got with Avengers. However they did bring plot out of the dump the next year. That’s right guys we’re going to focus on one of the shining stars of phase 2. Join me later today for Captain America: The Winter Soldier!